


Open or Apart

by More_night



Series: The Incredulity of Saint Thomas [4]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Episode: s03e07 Digestivo, Gen, Hangover Due to Conjunction with Cannibal, Missing Scene, Mostly Hannibal POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-06
Updated: 2016-02-06
Packaged: 2018-05-18 11:45:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5927182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/More_night/pseuds/More_night
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will is no longer exactly himself, Hannibal’s hopes are forming only as they crumble, Chiyoh asks a few questions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Open or Apart

**Author's Note:**

> Have some random sad?

Hannibal noticed Chiyoh’s eyes go to the rear-view mirror and turned around to look in the back seat. Will had woken up. His blue eyes were there beneath the daubed brown curls of his hair. They looked almost gray, like the blanket around him, like the car seat fabric, like the sky, gray with the leaving of the night. They were empty and worn out. And all of a sudden, the humming peace from the murders at Muskrat Farm waned in Hannibal as his thoughts shifted and rumpled.

“Can you stop the car?” Will asked Chiyoh.

They stopped on the side of the deserted road, graceless leavesless trees in the distance. Hannibal was not sure if they were in West Virginia yet.

Will fumbled for the door handle, fingers jerking, and he stumbled outside, making a few steps in the snow toward the trees before he fell to his knees. Chiyoh got out of the car. Hannibal only watched from the inside. Will took a handful of snow and brought it to his mouth. Eyes closed, he let it melt. Then he spat it out. It landed before him, more or less brown with the remnants of Cordell’s blood, rancid for the hours it had spent between his teeth.

Getting back up on unsteady feet, Will walked back to the car.

 

* * *

 

Chiyoh was sitting behind him to clean the burn in his back. The smell of the antiseptic surrounded him, stinging, greasy, a little sweet too. The pain was diffuse, mostly in the skin, deep and superficial all the same, but the flesh was different, puckered, uneven, like it could break, but he knew it would not.

The bed creaked when Will woke. Chiyoh continued to treat the wound, silent, dabbing the flesh with gauze. Hannibal did not bring his eyes up until Will’s steps had led him to stand in the doorway before them. He appeared to linger, unprotected, gaze searching the floor, haggard, still in the coat Hannibal had wrapped around him. Underneath, the clothes Mason had dressed him in for the introductory dinner and following surgery seemed a mockery, stained as they were now with blood. Hannibal had suggested that he take them off before sleeping, but Will had walked to the bed and curled on it.

Hannibal had not cleaned his face yet. The blood from one of the cuts on his forehead was cooling on his right temple. Will passed by him and Chiyoh, feet uneasy on the floors they knew so well, hand on the wall, toward the bathroom.

He shut the door and threw up what Hannibal supposed to be mostly bile. When he returned, he had washed his face, his hands, rinsed his mouth. He sat at the other end of the table and eyed Hannibal’s naked arms, naked chest, the scars, the bruises, the blood, as if he saw him for the first time, again, but was every time not the first time. Will must wonder if there was another skin yet underneath this one, then another, then another. And the most bizarre of all was that Hannibal was as bare as he could be, the black shirt pulled over his head and down his forearms, his hands crossed on Will’s table.

“Does your fireplace work?” Chiyoh asked, attention on her task.

Will nodded, then cleared his throat. His voice came out gruff and reluctant. “I usually keep wood at the back, but I haven’t been paying this place as much attention as I should have. Lately.” He gestured over his shoulder, toward the kitchen and the backyard. “There’s an axe in the barn and there should be a few large logs too.”

“I’ll get it,” she said. “Half of your breakers are busted, too.”

“Not just my breakers.” The lost, bitter air about Will was one Hannibal had not seen in a long time and it knotted something in his memory. “And not exactly busted,” Will went on.

Outside, the day was coming, with clouds navy blue against the pale sky, like black fingers stretching over the house. Chiyoh left the room and Will pulled the dirty coat tighter around himself. It smelled foremost of blood, but Hannibal could not tell how much was Will’s, how much was his and how much was the one of the man it had belonged to. Then the odor was mostly the one from its past owner: faint cigarette smoke, straw, liter, animals and sweat. A bright yellow entered the room, bleak, roaming and indifferent.

 

* * *

 

Will seemed inclined to remain silent. He had refused the water Chiyoh had offered, even if his mouth must be dry. His arm lay on the table, palm turned up. There were muscle contractions under the skin between his index and middle finger. Hannibal began to move his hand forward. “Don’t touch me. Please. Don’t touch me,” Will said, flexing his hand, eyes fixed ahead of him flickering up, stopping at Hannibal’s fingers, not moving up to his face.

Heedful, Hannibal brought his arm back to his chest. “As you wish,” he said. “How do you feel?”

Will let out a short breath, swallowed, arched his eyebrows. “I threw up. And I peed blood.”

“Your kidneys may be overrun by what Mason’s men gave you. I don’t know what it was.”

“You didn’t ask either,” Will said, with a humorless smile.

Just as Hannibal smiled slightly, Will’s face moved to sterness. “There were other forms of entertainment available at the time.”

“Did he torture you?”

Cocking his head, Hannibal found he could not read the emptiness in Will’s voice. The further he looked behind the blankness, there were only more uninvolved words, gone from the world, ghost to all that was left. Was there a world at all. “He planned to,” Hannibal answered.

 

* * *

 

Eventually, Will had left the kitchen table. He sat in one of the armchairs in his living room. Hannibal had followed. He took the opposite chair and found Will taking the coat off, inspecting its heavy black material. The blood had soaked into the lining. It was thick and crusted in places. It must have frozen in the cold winter night, then it would have melted down again from the warmth of Will’s body, then it had desiccated. Will smeared the dried, powdered blood on his fingers and closed his eyes, overwhelmed like Hannibal had rarely seen him. But he had not seen Will in so long, maybe, and the floor rolled under his feet at the thought, maybe what he had seen emerging in the other man had atrophied and spoiled. “This is death, to some degree,” he said, nodding to Will's fingertips. “Those are the traces it leaves behind, idle and derelict, compared to the force it rouses in us.”

“How can you tell the difference between hell and purgatory?” Will asked, faraway, dropping his hand into his lap.

The day had clearly risen now and, for a moment, Hannibal remembered Dante’s words again, of how they sounded in Bedelia’s mouth, of the vivid impression they had given him in his youth, of how they failed his soul in this instant, and he wondered if things could be torn open, or if they wouldn’t just be torn apart, and if so in how many parts, would he even be able to count them. “In hell, we wouldn’t know the difference and question ourselves always with the possibility that we may still be tested. In purgatory, things would be more transparent.”

Will scoffed gently, but it was different. “I was so sure I wouldn’t wake up. I was so glad when my eyes closed.”

Hannibal fell silent as the memory lived inside him. _The hammer still in hand, he entered the room Mason Verger had turned into an operating theater. There were plastic sheets on the walls. All things seemed sterile. Cordell did not see him approach at all, hunching over Will’s paralyzed body. The scalpel fell to the ground and Hannibal watched the blood sliding from Will’s cheek, down to his temple, then his ear, as Cordell struggled in his arms. Hannibal tightened his hold and the other man’s arms reached, grasped at nothing, his legs shifting beneath him, until he was unconscious._

_Hannibal picked up the scalpel and Will’s eyes followed it in his hand, erratic, panicked, his paralyzed limbs remaining loose and motionless in the binds. Hannibal placed the instrument down on the tray beside the bed and took his hand to the back of Will’s head, on the left side, where the blood had slid in the curls of hair. He felt the warmth there. He brought his hand to his lips and closed them over his index finger, where Will’s blood had wet his skin, making it somewhat fresh and clean and renewed, as if in the dawn of a new life. Will’s breathing quickened. And Hannibal ran his hand over his eyes, pushing the eyelids down. Given the extent of the paralysis in the limbs and the difficult breathing, Will would not be able to open them by himself. Hannibal searched the nearby drawers, found Thiopental and Fentanyl and injected both in Will’s IV._

“Wouldn’t you have been disappointed not to have rid the world of me?” Hannibal finally asked.

“It’s us. We can’t coexist,” Will opposed, soft, determined, coarse, all of this too deeply within himself for it to show entirely through. “It’s too much, it’s too painful.”

“Do you really experience it as pain?”

“It’s a... saturation. Like a light too bright, or a color too strong. It doesn’t leave room for anything else.”

“Has it occurred to you that this may be why I appreciate your company?”

A short breath left Will and all that had been playing on his face became an air of despair and loss. Shame, also, Hannibal could see, but from what. From a goal not achieved, or from something like regret, or from fear turned into its moral form. “I couldn’t tell what was you and me in Italy. I can now.”

“Doesn’t this disconnection leave you feeling lonely?” he asked. Something started to grow within him, too small to identify for now. “I like the idea of walking the world with an inseparable shadow.”

“It’s like I’ve been gone from myself since so long and I’ve just come back and found it... devastated,” Will said, eyes to the room around them, the dust, the cold. Outside, there was the steady noise of Chiyoh chopping the wood, resembling a heartbeat, but so slow it could only be a monster's.

“Then why not return to me, with me?” Hannibal said, and the thing grew further. It was bigger than him, or was it him that felt smaller. Somewhere, in the space between him and this greater self, Will Graham died and did not die again and again.

Will hung his head. There was more dried blood on his scalp. “I was _so sure_ I would die,” he whispered.

“So sure that now you’ve lost all certainty?”

“All exacting cohesion. All vain solidity. It’s like I’m water and you want to make me believe you could hold me in your cupped hands.”

“Maybe I can.”

“Yeah. Maybe you could.” Will paused. “I’m not even scared,” he said through a smile, not amused but bewildered, estranged. “The fear, the nightmares were... nice. In retrospect.” Will still was not looking at him, he had not since he had woken. “Why aren’t you killing me, now?”

“I promised Alana. To protect you.” This greater feeling, it surely had a name.

“What’d she give you for that?”

Hannibal stared at Will and answered only when it was obvious that the other man would not look back. “Her own life.”

“Is this supposed to make me feel better?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

It was hope. This feeling that had inflated him until now. It was hope, standing tall among the rest, brighter than the memory of detaching the skin of Cordell’s face from his bones and fatty tissues, stronger than the mixture of horror and tension and alarm he had drunk from Will’s eyes as he lay on the gurney, with Cordell’s incision to his face still fresh. And he knew it was hope because it had left him. There was only Will before him now, nothing else, no magnificient dusk, nor the twilight of metamorphosis.

Hannibal leaned forward in his seat and reached behind his head, grasping his shirt to pull it up on his back. “Can you read what it says?” he asked.

“What?”

“The Verger crest burned on my back. Can you decipher it? Mason didn’t specify what it said. I thought it was meant as a prank that I couldn’t read it by myself.”

Will got up with difficulty. There was a stiffness in his left leg. He walked around the chair. Hannibal closed his eyes, inhaled and smelled the dry blood on Will’s clothes and skin, mixing with the rest of him, strangely identical to what it had always been. “It just says Verger. There’s a… pig-chimera in the middle,” Will said. Hannibal pulled the shirt back down. “I need to close my eyes. I feel like my insides are too vast for my skin.”

“Should I be gone when you wake?”

“Do...” Will shrugged. “Do whatever you want.”

“Change clothes, and wash, if you can,” Hannibal advised, softly. “The cleanliness will help you rest.”

“Yes.” Will again smiled the tepid smile that carried all emotions but for pleasure. “Rest.”

Strange how hope would only appear after it had faltered, withered, died, but no, death was too blazing for this, and it still burned him, and again, like blood circling the body, perfusing the brain, it rose in him, and he no longer felt strange but only distended, as if his skin was about to give out, open or apart he could not tell.

 

* * *

 

Chiyoh returned inside and found Hannibal in the small kitchen, by the window. Will was in his bed, eyes open. He had not changed clothes. She placed the first three logs in the fireplace. “Where’s the hot water valve?” she said.

“Downstairs in the cellar, in the back,” Will said, vacantly. “It’ll probably be stuck, it’s rusty. On the window ledge, there’s a broken wrench I use as a handle.”

“I’ll manage.” Her breathing had slowed down. The axe had bruised her hands, the right one at the base of her thumb and the left on the inside of her index finger. She stopped on her way to the door and turned around. “And where are you?”

“There is no me. Hence, there is no place I should be, right?”

Chiyoh nodded, put her gloved hands in the pockets of her coat. The room turned colder for a moment while the door opened and closed.

 

* * *

 

There was no trace of Hannibal nearby when Will woke up once more, but he knew he was still there, all around, ever. There was a black notebook in one of the chairs. The power had returned, a lamp was on in the corner. He sat on the edge of the bed, feeling like he had been nauseated forever.

He got up, opened drawers and fetched out a shirt, pants, t-shirt and underwear. He changed, then went back under the covers, buried his face in the soft pillowcase dotted with powdered dried blood. When it came, whatever it was, it did not feel like sleep.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I have also officially [tumbled](https://davantagedenuit.tumblr.com/) into this fandom.


End file.
